A Douglas County jury is expected to spend the next week listening to doctors, police and other experts try to convince it that a Castle Rock foster mother either was abusive and violent with two of her foster kids or she is a conscientious caregiver being wrongfully blamed for two unpreventable accidents.
As the six-day trial got underway Wednesday in Castle Rock, Deputy District Attorney Darren Vahle told the eight-woman, five-man jury that Tember Rector, 44, caused massive brain injuries to Timmy Dodge, a 2-year-old in her care on Feb. 2, 2004.
Vahle also told the jury that eight months earlier, Rector broke a 7-year-old foster child’s arm by shoving her down the stairs. Rector is charged with two counts of reckless child abuse causing serious bodily injury.
Vahle said Rector’s alibis are full of holes, that she claimed Timmy fell off her bed and hit his head on a nightstand while she was showering. Yet the shower walls, bathmat and towel weren’t wet, he said. Rector never went to Children’s Hospital that night, Vahle said, and she seemed “very calm, more concerned about getting her story out.”
A host of doctors will testify that Timmy’s injuries could not have been caused by falling off a bed but were more consistent with extreme force, such as abuse or falling out of a building, he said.
Rector’s attorney, Jim Pickard, told the jury that no one saw the accident and that the experts can’t agree with certainty what happened. “No one can conclude these were knowingly and intentionally inflicted injuries,” Pickard said.
He said that at the time of the boy’s injury, Rector was shaving her legs in the shower, turning on water only to rinse the razor, and that hospital officials told her not to come because the boy’s parents were there, angry and threatening.
Pickard said his experts will testify that “forces in an accidental fall are sufficient to cause these injuries.”
As for the young girl, Pickard said, she received a hairline fracture of her wrist when she fell while running to the school bus and never complained about the injury for days.
He said Rector reported both accidents immediately and cooperated fully and that police were shoddy in their investigation. He said the girl’s injury wasn’t investigated by law enforcement until the boy was injured months later.
